Carer’s Allowance Overpayments

Debate between Stephen Timms and Rushanara Ali

Tuesday 14th April 2026 Westminster Hall

[Sir Stephen Timms]

My hon. Friend makes a very good point. I will come on to that, because there is some progress in that area.

As my hon. Friend said, having made the change to the earnings limit, we commissioned the independent review led by Liz Sayce, the former chief executive of Disability Rights UK and a well-respected and widely recognised expert in disability benefits. Her review was published in November and, in my view, she did a brilliant job. She really got to grips with what had gone wrong, and I echo my hon. Friend’s thanks to her. The report found that many carers had faced unexpected debts because of errors in the way that the DWP had applied averaging rules on fluctuating earnings. The guidance used by DWP staff since 2015 had not properly reflected the law, which permits averaging over a period when assessing whether earnings are above or below the earnings limit.

The case that my hon. Friend mentioned of somebody who was receiving income once every six months is a clear example of the problem. I do not know what the figures were in that case, but it may well be that if Helen’s earnings had been averaged over six months instead of being taken into account in one month, they would have been below the limit. That is exactly the sort of instance that we will examine in the reassessment exercise, which I will say more about in a moment.

We accepted 38 of Liz Sayce’s 40 recommendations in full or in part, and we have already made progress on more than half of them. I will set out those recommendations and what we have done in response, and I will pick up on a couple of my hon. Friend’s questions. The review recommended putting right historical overpayments caused by flawed guidance on the averaging of earnings. I am pleased to say that new and correct guidance has now been in place since the start of September 2025, but it was wrong from 2015 for 10 years.

We are now delivering the reassessment exercise that Liz Sayce recommended: reclassifying affected overpayments as “not recoverable”, refunding carers where appropriate, and applying a fair approach where records are no longer held by the Department. The reassessment exercise began yesterday, so this debate is particularly well timed, and I am grateful to my hon. Friend for having secured it.

As my hon. Friend said, the Government have set aside £75 million of funding for refunds under the exercise in the financial years 2026-27 to 2028-29. That is a three-year period; we are hoping we can complete the exercise in two, but just to be sure, we have allowed three years to ensure we can complete it properly. We are expecting to review more than 200,000 cases, so it is a major undertaking. As she said, we estimate that we will be reducing, cancelling or refunding debts for perhaps some 25,000 carers in the course of the exercise.

[Rushanara Ali]

I draw the Minister’s attention to a point about reassessment made in yesterday’s Guardian:

“the government has admitted its existing ‘business as usual’ overpayment recovery policies will be maintained while a full overhaul of the benefit is completed, in effect ensuring that carer’s allowance penalties will continue to be imposed.”

Can the Minister assure us that that is not the case and that these penalties will not continue to be imposed?

[Sir Stephen Timms]

Let me come to that point in a moment. I saw the article that my hon. Friend refers to. It is an important point, and I will address it in a couple of minutes.

My hon. Friends have quite rightly raised questions about accountability for the review’s delivery. We have appointed a senior responsible officer, and we have committed to update both the Public Accounts Committee and the Work and Pensions Committee on progress every six months. The review highlighted the need for clearer guidance and better communication with carers, particularly on earnings averaging, overpayments and reporting responsibilities, so we have revised the decision letters so that carers are clearer on how their earnings have been averaged and on exactly what changes they need to report and when.

We have also redesigned the overpayment communications to be clearer and to show more empathy, I hope, than was shown in communications previously. We have strengthened the signposting to independent advice and debt support, including to charities and free money guidance, and we have made it clearer how carers can ask questions, challenge decisions or agree affordable repayment plans. We are continuing to test and develop the letters and the guidance, and there has been recent user research to assess clarity, understanding and impact.

We are planning further improvements. I want to express my appreciation for the carers organisations, particularly Carers UK and the Carers Trust, that we have been working with. They have put a good deal of work into this, together with the Department, to try to ensure we get these communications right. I hope that is going to be a significant improvement.

The Sayce review pointed to the lack of awareness and take-up of carers’ national insurance credits. We want to make sure that carers understand what they are entitled to, so we have been reviewing our letters and guidance to increase awareness. The review recommended reducing the impact of the earnings cliff edge while longer-term reform is developed. As my hon. Friend the Member for Shipley quite rightly pointed out, if someone is a penny over the earnings limit, they are not entitled to any carer’s allowance; that has been the case ever since 1976.

We have commissioned research on the impact of the higher earnings limit, which is now being regularly updated, unlike in the past, and commissioned behavioural research to inform future policy decisions, including changes to regulations, short-term mitigations and longer-term reform, including a taper. In the end, I think that will be the answer: instead of an earnings cliff edge or cut-off limit, there should be an arrangement so that the carer’s allowance reduces in a tapered way. It will take some time to develop that and put the IT in place and so on, so we are looking at what we can do in the meantime.

As my hon. Friend touched on, the review recommended better join-up between carer’s allowance, universal credit and other benefits. We are aware that a considerable burden is placed on carers, requiring them to resolve offsetting issues themselves. We have accepted Liz Sayce’s recommendation, and we will put in place an automated solution. While we develop that—again, that will take a while—we will put in place a manual workaround.

The review recommended tackling backlogs and identifying overpayments earlier. We have reduced the backlog of automated earnings notifications from HMRC. We now process those alerts much faster, allowing issues to be identified more quickly—another point raised by my hon. Friend. In future, we want to follow up on all those alerts, not just about half of them as we did in the past, so that we can draw people’s attention to problems as they arise. Taken together, those actions are about listening to carers, fixing what went wrong, supporting people better and modernising carer’s allowance in the future.

In response to the review’s recommendations on faulty averaging guidance, we will reassess carer’s allowance cases that might have been affected. A number of people, including my hon. Friend the Member for Bethnal Green and Stepney, have raised the question of why we did not pause all carer’s allowance earnings overpayments action pending the review’s outcome. My answer is that we have been clear about our approach all along: we have to balance fairness for carers with our duty to taxpayers. If money has been paid out incorrectly, it needs to be recovered. We have retained that position as the review was under way.

In most cases, the Department already holds enough information to carry out the reassessment, and affected carers will not need to take action unless the DWP asks for additional details. For older overpayment cases, dating back to 2015 or perhaps a few years after that, the DWP may no longer hold the relevant data and information: we are required to retain data only as long as it is needed for the purpose for which it was collected. The Department will open a simple online form to allow people to submit the relevant information. We are aiming to do that in November this year.

The Department will work closely with organisations supporting carers who think they may have been affected to register for reassessment on gov.uk. Everybody whose case is reviewed will be notified of the outcome, including whether their overpayment has been confirmed or changed. Advice and support for anyone whose carer’s allowance case is, or might be, involved in the reassessment exercise will be available, at no cost, from the Department or trusted partner organisations such as Carers UK and the Carers Trust—I thank them again.

Hon. Members have asked how progress will be tracked. The reassessment exercise is part of our broader response to the independent review and, as I have said, we have committed to updating the Public Accounts Committee and the Work and Pensions Committee on our progress every six months. Those updates will include statistics on progress, and they will enable the Committees to scrutinise progress and hold the Department to account. We will also put some information in our annual report and accounts.

Rebuilding trust requires honesty, accountability and action, and that is the approach we have aimed to take throughout this process. We have to fix the problems and correct the mistakes; the work of unpaid carers is too important and too valuable not to do so. More broadly, we want to improve and modernise carer’s allowance to make it easier for unpaid carers to combine their caring responsibilities with paid work where they are able to, and better reward them for doing so. We will also ensure that those receiving carer’s allowance and universal credit receive a more joined-up service than they have in the past. We owe that to those who provide such a vital service to our fellow citizens.

I know that my hon. Friend the Member for Shipley, the all-party parliamentary group and the Committees represented in the debate will scrutinise how we deliver on those aims very closely. They are absolutely right to do so.

Motion lapsed (Standing Order No. 10(6)).

Tackling the Digital Divide

Debate between Stephen Timms and Rushanara Ali

Thursday 4th November 2021 Westminster Hall

[Rushanara Ali (in the Chair)]

Before we begin, I remind Members that they are expected to wear face coverings when not speaking in the debate. This is in line with the Government’s guidance and that of the House of Commons Commission. I also remind Members that they are asked by the House to have covid lateral flow tests twice a week—I am sure you all have. You can do that at home or on the parliamentary estate, and you can pick up tests here to take home. Please also give each other enough space when seated and when entering and leaving the Chamber.

[Stephen Timms (East Ham) (Lab)]

I beg to move,

That this House has considered the matter of tackling the digital divide.

I am delighted to be serving under your chairmanship this afternoon, Ms Ali. It strikes me, and I am pleased to see, that with you, me and the Minister, we have strong east London representation in the Chamber today. I am also pleased that the Work and Pensions Committee is strongly represented in the debate. I think there is a significant crossover between the digital divide and the concerns the Committee has been engaged with.

Let me begin with a tribute to the hon. Member for North Devon (Selaine Saxby), who is chair of the all-party parliamentary group for broadband and digital communication—I am the vice-chair of that group. Before her recent well-deserved promotion, she was the sponsor—the initiator—of this debate. She is not able to lead on it, given her current position, but I am pleased to have the opportunity to do so as a rather poor substitute.

As we all know, there has been dramatic progress in getting people online since March of last year. Lloyds Bank’s UK consumer digital index, published in May, reported:

“In the last 12 months, 1.5 million more people have started using the Internet, resulting in 95% now being online… We have made five years’ worth of progress in one”.

It has been a pretty dramatic change. The report makes the point that it is

“well evidenced that people using digital tools and services have a real advantage”.

It also points out that digital skills have moved from being an advantage to being a necessity during the pandemic.

The fact that so many have come newly online is an opportunity for us to build on. But 2.6 million people still are not online. Ofcom reported in July that 2 million households struggle with the cost of broadband or smartphone services, with some staying offline as a result of those cost barriers. Ten million people also lack basic digital skills.

I am sorry to say that the Government’s digital inclusion strategy has not been updated since 2014. It is high time that it was. The topic has not had the priority in Government that I hope it will have in the period ahead. I warmly welcome the Minister to her post, which she took up relatively recently. I hope that in winding up the debate she will be able to hold out the prospect of new priority being given to digital inclusion and of policies enabling real progress on it in the period ahead.

The Good Things Foundation focuses its impressive range of programmes on the digital divide. Its document “A blueprint to fix the digital divide”, published in September, identifies three requirements. No.1 is digital skills, No. 2 is community support and No. 3 is affordable internet, and I will use those three headings in my remarks.

First, on digital skills, progress is very important for levelling up. The Lloyds Bank report pointed out that people using digital services are

“more likely to build their savings reserves, find new ways to save money and can more easily find and access new information, plus manage their well-being”.

We might add that they can also more readily look for a job, apply for universal credit and manage their universal credit account online.

There is a real levelling-up challenge here. Whereas, according to Ofcom, fewer than 21% of people in London are limited internet users, that proportion is almost twice as high—38%—in the north-east, the region represented by my hon. Friend the Member for Newcastle upon Tyne Central (Chi Onwurah), who is the shadow Front Bencher for this afternoon’s debate. The other nations and regions fall between those two figures, and within regions levels of engagement are much lower among benefit claimants than among other people. I hope that digital inclusion and the development of digital skills will be supported by the UK shared prosperity fund, and that the Government will support local initiatives to tackle the problem, such as Andy Street’s digital catch-up programme in the west midlands to help those who cannot use the internet to learn digital skills, and Andy Burnham’s ambition for Greater Manchester, which is to help all people who are 25 and under, over 75 or disabled to get online.

The Government’s entitlement for people to get full funding for essential digital skills qualifications is welcome, but we need to go further. Level 1 qualifications are not meeting the needs of local employers, while those who stand to gain the most are least likely to engage if they do not first get informal, community-based help. Age is the biggest determinant, with older people less likely to have digital skills. Age UK reports that in the first quarter of this calendar year 40% of over-75s and 12% of 65 to 74-year-olds had not used the internet in the previous three months. However, there is also a big group of younger people who need help. Ofcom’s 2021 technology tracker research found that among school-aged children—those aged between four and 18—eight in 10 had access to an appropriate device at home all of the time, enabling them to connect to the internet for online schoolwork or learning as needed. Of the remainder, 13% had access some of the time, but 2% rarely had access and 2% never had access, meaning that a significant group of school-age children are fully excluded.

Over a fifth of the respondents to a survey quoted in a Vodafone report on the UK’s digital divide last month did not have the software in their household to complete their work, education or leisure pursuits. We also need to reflect on the digital skills that more and more people in work are going to have to acquire, and the Government’s lifetime skills guarantee needs to address that issue directly. techUK has highlighted the gap between, on the one hand, the upsurge in demand for digitally skilled workers in areas such as coding and, on the other, the limited opportunities to retrain in those fields, with a need for immediate action to close that growing digital skills gap. By 2030, it is estimated that nine out of 10 workers are going to need to learn new skills to do their job, at a cost of well over £1 billion a year.

That brings us to the second area, community support. Helen Milner, the chief executive of the Good Things Foundation, has called for support to develop

“a national network of at least 10,000 trusted places where people can get community help with digital inclusion—reaching into villages, towns and cities, and supporting COVID-19 recovery.”

A very good example of such a place is Skills Enterprise, a charity based in Bonny Downs Baptist Church in my constituency and founded in 2006 by the energetic social entrepreneur Malathy Muthu. It is a small but very effective training provider, which quickly reorganised for the pandemic to stop people who were already digitally excluded being further isolated. The Good Things Foundation helped by providing devices that Skills Enterprise could distribute through its DevicesDotNow partnership with FutureDotNow, which raised over £1.5 million nationally to supply devices and data. Skills Enterprise used those devices to ensure that people who would not otherwise have been able to get online could do so during the pandemic.

The number of service users Skills Enterprise supported increased by 50% during the pandemic, and it is now supporting 160 people. I presented certificates to a number of them on a visit last month. It has helped people who were setting up businesses, who were home-schooling, or who were simply having to self-isolate—showing them how to download and use things such as Zoom. Skills Enterprise has helped people with online shopping and banking, and it has helped a large number of people to apply for universal credit, as applications became online-only during the pandemic. It found that virtual form-filling sessions typically lasted around three hours over the telephone for applicants who were not digitally confident and who needed to be talked through the process of applying for universal credit. I am pleased to say that Skills Enterprise has worked with Jobcentre Plus as well. Two people were able to save £300 a year after Skills Enterprise helped them to switch energy providers online, and 23 people it has worked with have found jobs during the pandemic thanks to the acquisition of new digital skills.

Skills Enterprise is an example of exactly the kind of place that the Good Things Foundation rightly says we need across the country. It is having a positive local impact, but there are not enough centres like that around. Funding from central Government is needed urgently to deploy digital champions around the country and to support grassroots organisations to address the divide.

The third area is affordable internet. The scaling back of the Government’s ambitions for connectivity has been a big disappointment. The Government started with a target of 100% fibre by 2025. That was downgraded to 100% gigabit by 2025, and then down again to 85% gigabit by 2025. We are now falling further behind the rest of Europe, and we really should be doing better. Some £5 billion has been provided, but I understand that only a fraction of that will now be invested by 2025; the rest will not be invested until later.

Openreach has estimated that a nationwide full-fibre deployment could add £59 billion to the UK economy by 2025. With growth so elusive in the economy and the Chancellor forecasting that it will be down to 1.3% by the end of his forecast period, that sort of growth is a prize that we cannot afford to forgo.

The Government’s shared rural network scheme aims to provide 4G coverage to 95% of the UK by 2025. I think Vodafone has announced coverage of two Welsh villages under the scheme, but I do not know of any other announcements on increasing coverage that have been made by UK mobile operators as part of this initiative. Will the Minister update us on its progress and on whether there are prospects for more such projects in the near future?

The universal service obligation, launched by the Government in March, which I welcome, allows rural households to demand connectivity from BT, but some of that connectivity might have a very high price indeed, with reports of 60,000 households being charged up to £100,000 each in order to gain the access being provided. Will the Minister give us some reassurance that the access that the USO ensures will be affordable, and will she give an indication of the extent to which the USO has been effective in extending access in the first six months or so of its operation? I commend the work of the Broadband Stakeholder Group, which has set out a range of ideas for steps that the Government can take to increase access in the hardest-to-reach areas, and I hope Ministers will take those ideas forward.

The price to users is a major issue. Households with the lowest incomes spend nearly four times more as a proportion of their disposable income on fixed broadband than the average. Ofcom reports that at least 100,000 households, and possibly many more, are unlikely to gain internet access in the next year because of the price they would have to pay to get it. Ofcom research also found that 4% of families with school-age children relied solely on mobile devices during the pandemic.

I welcome the efforts of telcos and others with innovative partnerships and new social tariffs. TalkTalk’s partnership with the Department for Work and Pensions provides eligible jobseekers with an uncapped broadband service for six months to help them search for jobs, with the DWP paying the fixed cost of the connection and TalkTalk offering the service on a not-for-profit basis. I welcome that imaginative approach and the partnership that has been established.

Vodafone has a buy one, give one scheme in partnership with the Trussell Trust, which I also welcome. BT, Community Fibre, Hyperoptic, KCOM, Virgin Media and VOXI each offer at least one targeted tariff with unlimited internet access, priced with varying degrees of affordability. Some are priced at £10 per month, which is very good, and some at rather more than that. Is the Minister keeping under consideration the possibility of imposing a requirement for social tariffs on all providers?

There is clearly a great deal more to be done on this front. After the pandemic, there can be little dispute about the central place of digital inclusion in any programme for levelling up. The pandemic has rapidly accelerated take-up, but it has also deepened the disadvantage experienced by those who do not yet have digital access. I hope that the Minister will be able to reassure the House that the Government recognise the crucial importance of this issue and that she will prioritise making progress on it in the spending review period ahead.

Flammable Cladding Removal

Debate between Stephen Timms and Rushanara Ali

Tuesday 14th July 2020 Commons Chamber

[Rushanara Ali]

I could not agree more.

The Housing, Communities and Local Government Committee found that the £1 billion building safety fund would pay for only 600 of the buildings, when actually we need billions to ensure that all buildings in the country that are in this unsafe state can be addressed.

[Stephen Timms (East Ham) (Lab)]

My hon. Friend is making an excellent argument. Is it not particularly unsatisfactory that Ministers have signed up to the principle that leaseholders should not have to bear these costs, but have not provided the funds to make a reality of it?

[Rushanara Ali]

Absolutely.

We are finding that the small print requirements that housing associations and local authorities are having to pass is excluding them from accessing funding. They are then having to pass on the bill to the leaseholders, as hon. Members have said. Our leaseholder constituents cannot afford tens of thousands of pounds when right now their jobs are on the line, they are struggling to make ends meet and struggling to feed their kids. Middle-class families are having to rely on food banks in this crisis, and now they are worried about what will happen to their housing.

Education Funding in London

Debate between Stephen Timms and Rushanara Ali

Wednesday 4th May 2016 Commons Chamber

[Rushanara Ali]

I completely agree with my right hon. Friend. It would be yet another broken promise. I hope that the Minister will listen carefully today and make sure that that promise is not broken.

[Stephen Timms (East Ham) (Lab)]

Has my hon. Friend seen the estimate which states that if the F40 proposals were implemented as tabled by the hon. Member for Beverley and Holderness (Graham Stuart) and others, the most prosperous 30 authorities in the country would gain more than £200 million and the least prosperous would lose more than £200 million?

[Rushanara Ali]

My right hon. Friend makes a very important point. That is exactly what schoolteachers are concerned about. That cannot happen. It goes to show that there is not a good motive behind this change. The Government should be ashamed of themselves, and the Minister should take action.